When "flat" design came into play, it was both admired and questioned. It was adopted by tech companies and cutting-edge industries. As for other industries, the adoption is a little slower. Education, for instance, has only just started taking it into consideration.

If education has only just started incorporating "flat" design into online education, do other industries stand a chance? I think that they do, and I want to discuss how another industry, government, can adopt some of these principles.

The Principle of "flat" Design

This design style is not just a trend. It is based on simplifying the user experience. Buttons on a website were designed to reflect a real life look and feel when they didn't need to. Buttons slowly lost the extra effects, both on the web and in technology overall. Much of this change is because of Apple, when they made the switch from iOS 6 to 7 and changed the entire interface.

User interfaces are focusing more on getting the user where they need to go and utilizing the advantages of the web instead of trying to copy real life.

Government and Web Design

The government has never been one to jump on trends, because they aren't fast enough. They have adopted the web in certain ways but have yet to do so in others.

"Flat" design may still be relatively new, but if an industry like Education can adopt these principles, government can follow.

Start Small

In education, online schools are the ones adopting flat design, but textbooks might be soon to follow. With this in mind, smaller municipal sites can start with small tweaks and scale from there.

This is often opposite from the popular "trickle down" effect, but the cost of a top-down approach would not be beneficial.

Does this approach work?

Based on Colorado governments, cities like Boulder and Colorado Springs already adopted this trend. When we redid the site for the City of Colorado Springs, we used "flat" design to increase simplicity.

For this project, our focus was on helping users find information they need quickly. Using "flat" design helped to simplify the user interface so users weren't distracted. Buttons didn't need to apply fancy designs to communicate usability. They could be flat and still provide a response when the cursor moved over them or clicked.

How does this work offline?

As I mentioned above, education is working to apply this design in places other than websites like textbooks. This is a much simpler layout, and more importantly will help bring a greater level on continuity to the digital and physical media students will utilize.

In Review...

Flat design may have started as a trend, but it has grown from good design principles to simplify the user experience. It can be used in more areas beyond websites to reduce complexity and make interfaces cleaner.